Capital Audiofest

Another year, another sleepless weekend in DC.  Here are some pictures from the room and links to show coverage.  Pete Hutchison of The Electric Recording Company sent over a test acetate that he cut of Sonny Rollins Way Out West which was sublime.  We were running 301's, a Schick and a Schröder with lots of silver and mercury.  I'll let a few pictures do the talking and those that write professionally tell the tale.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/emia-re-visioned-quad-esl-57s-loudspeakers-garrard-301-turntable-shroeder-and-schick

We were also showing the 50 amps, Autoformer, LR phono and SUT's in the Refined Audio room.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/cube-audio-mini-nenuphar-loudspeakers-emia-audio-electronics-tw-acoustic-raven-gt-turntable

Jack Roberts blurb on the Audio Beatnik

https://theaudiobeatnik.com/caf-2019-the-emia-room-and-stacked-quads/

Sid Smith's ESL speaker

I received a call from Ijaz to go pick up a piece of equipment from Sid Smith's son in law in New Haven, CT.  Many years ago Sid built an electrostatic speaker and I was to get the wire bending machine he built to make the stators.  Below are some pictures of the machine and what it was used for.

Apparently a successor to this speaker was shown by Joe Grado at the 1968 Philadelphia Audio Show and in today's dollar it would have been a $5700.  It is unclear whether that id for a single or a pair but even at double it is still a fraction of what the market commands today.

dave

CAF 2018

Another year... another awesome event.  We took the show on the road again down to Washington DC for the Capital Audiofest.  This year consisted of a stack of rebuilt ESL 57 panels in a "stacked T" configuration.

Each pair of stacked panels had its own 300B based biamp setup with a line level crossover and step up output transformers.

The big changes in the amplification for this year were the addition of mercury rectifiers and .9999 silver wire throughout the amps including the plate chokes and output transformers.

The front end was analog only sporting a couple of 301's in maple and dymondwood plinths.

The cartridge was the next revision of the field coil built from the ground up seen here spinning on a test pressing of an upcoming ERC release of The Folk Blues of John Lee Hooker.

More of the ERC collection was also available to play.

Rather than go on about how awesome the sound was, we will leave it in the capable hands of Art Dudley and Michael Lovorgna

https://www.stereophile.com/content/rocking-rockville-late-day-one-and-early-day-two

https://twitteringmachines.com/caf-2018-emia-labs/

This is a funny story of what goes on in the halls of the show....

https://www.crutchfield.com/S-t6omU04pPgv/learn/2018-capital-audiofest-highlights.html

Stop the Insanity

We have been playing with the high voltage supplies on the "direct drive" quads and on a whim we tried some higher valued caps that the "stock" 0.001µf values.

I just happened to have a bunch of these 4µf caps and we gave that a go and things improved.  Onward and upward we went in values to see if there was a limit we could exceed.

10µ was better than 4µ and I think it may have had something to do with the Italian made capacitors which are obviously audiophile approved which can be seen by a closer inspection of the brand.

25µ was next and again for some reason things got better so next up are these banks of 50µ @ 900V caps.

Stay Tuned (or come listen to them in early November at the Capital Audiofest.)

Quad ESL 57 Eye Candy

While in DC for the CAF, I had the pleasure of meeting Wayne Piquet and Kent McCollom two of the guys who rebuild Quads here in the states.  On the last day we were able to hear Wayne's new panels in solid maple frames made by one of the "andy's" and I have to say they were a huge leap forward in both sonics and efficinecy over the stock panels they replaced.

We started setup with a pair of forward facing single panels and then put the doubles in front to confirm phase.

Then we returned to the original setup of the three panels with a single facing forward and the doubles facing the outer wall.